


Graff of the Black Rose

by GraffXIV



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Garleans (Final Fantasy XIV), Heroism, Hrothgar (Final Fantasy XIV), Hrothgar Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), M/M, Mortality, Other, Post-Apocalypse, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:27:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26682190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GraffXIV/pseuds/GraffXIV
Summary: In an alternate timeline, Graff Ironchest lives out his final days on the Bozjan front.<< Please note this work contains plot point spoilers for late-game Final Fantasy XIV 4.X and early 5.0. >>
Kudos: 5





	Graff of the Black Rose

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this based on an indirect prompt from Twitter user @roefizzlebeef, asking how your character, in their non-WoL canon (that is to say, the canon you decide for them outside of the game's baked-in story), would die in the timeline in which the Empire's release of Black Rose causes the Eighth Umbral Calamity.
> 
> I have deep issues with mortality, so this was a cathartic piece to write.

“Lagerthasch? That isn’t a Bozjan tribe. Your tribe has been Garlean conscripts for decades.”

The guards took on menacing stances, brandishing gunblades and polearms, but Graff stood stock-still in the face of it. His gaze was firmly set on the Hrothgar in front of him, though only through his right eye-- the left had been sealed with a grisly scar. Even with his advanced Conjury, it was not a wound he was able to heal.

Stoically, Graff advanced a step toward the desk of Gangos’s commanding officer, only to feel a halberd’s tip at his throat, and a trickle of warm blood roll down to the collar of his coat. “Do with me what you will,” he growled, his voice ruined into gravel by the fallout from the poison cloud that had enveloped the world. “It is true that Bozja was never my home, but your people need medics if you’d rather them not die like dogs on what’s left of the battlefield.” Digging into his pocket, such audacity shocking the guards still surrounding him, he produced a scorched patch, which he tossed onto the captain’s desk.

_Serpent Captain of the Twin Adder, Graff Ironchest_ .

Immediately, the guards began to withdraw their weapons upon seeing the insignia, shocked reverence on their faces. “An Adder Captain?” murmured the Gangos commander, his eyebrows raised. He immediately began waving for his men to stand down, but was too late in the gesture-- they had already given him a wide, and apologetic, berth. “And a Gridanian  _Conjurer_ ? Gods be good, why didn’t you lead with that?”

In truth, it was too painful for Graff to even say the name of the land he had served aloud. The Black Shroud was naught but ash and the skeletons of once-mighty trees, corroded to wastes by Black Rose. Between the memories of the silence of those killed by the gas, and the screams of those caught in the subsequent umbral storm, the Hrothgar had not seen a night’s sleep in nearly a month. It had been he who recovered the body of Kan-E-Senna from the Lotus Stand, withered and old without the blessing of the Elementals to sustain her. It had been he, as a Conjurer, who performed her last rites, in the presence of perhaps two-dozen survivors of the calamity. The whole of the Gridanian population that remained.

In the end, Graff could save almost no one. Among the uncountable casualties, he was unable to find the body of Owainnaut, the first man to call him “friend” among the Gridanian people, the first one to embrace him as a lover in his fifty summers. Graff hoped, against all odds, that perhaps Owainnaut had escaped, that he had fallen back to the ruins of the Duskwight city of Gelmorra, where the gas and the umbral storm could not reach. That some day, somewhere, they would meet again, under a blue sky.

He hoped the same for Crystal River, the Hellsguard woman who had saved him all those years ago on the banks of Abalathia, that she too may have escaped the second calamity of her lifetime. Where she had gone after the Hellsguard had departed Sohm Al, he did not know, and it pained him to think of her and the moniker of “Iron Chest” she had given him.

Graff stood silent before the commander for a long moment. His attire, once carefully and painstakingly bespoke to his own sense of fashion, was soiled and torn. The leaves decorating the circlet that once marked him as a Gridanian Elite no longer thrived, crisp and brown-black.

“Send me to the front,” Graff finally spake. His own voice seemed foreign, as though it floated from a shell, divorced from his consciousness. “I will save who I can, be they Bozjan or Garlean. The only reason I came to Gangos was to grant you the courtesy.”

The commander cleared his throat, ears pinned back as though he had been scolded. Of course he had heard rumor of a Hrothgar officer that had risen rapidly through the Gridanian ranks, that had fought at Ghimlyt against the Empire, never having expected the man himself would arrive on his doorstep. “Yes, yes of course,” he said hurriedly, glancing about at his men. “Show Captain Ironchest--”

Graff interrupted him. “Lagerthasch,” he corrected. “Graff dus Lagerthasch.”

Slowly, the commander resumed the order. “Show Captain Lagerthasch to a tent, and bring him a change of clothes--”

Again, Graff held up a hand to interrupt him. “No tent, no rest, no clothes. Put me on a ferry to the Front in the next hour.”

The commander swallowed hard, and though he hesitated, finally nodded in assent.

_I am the walking dead. I will make what’s left of my life mean something in this world of ruin._

The aether on Bozja was dry, burned away by the umbral storms, but Graff persisted. If he could not draw on the natural world for his conjury, he would use the aether of his corpus. All around, bodies lay still, the only sound the stomping of Magitek automata, their behavior rendered erratic by the unstable environment. He watched through his singular eye as a vanguard eviscerated a staggering Imperial eques. Even the Garleans were not safe. He had to keep low, out of sight of the haywire monsters that stalked the battlefield.

A misstep nearly sent him tumbling into a trench-- Garlean iron substructure told him the original allegiance, but the bloated corpses he landed upon after his descent were those of both sides, Imperial officers and Bozjan soldiers.  _Not that there are ‘sides’ anymore_ , Graff reminded himself, and he began to work his way forward, deeper into the connecting tunnel. These trenches were designed for Garlean soldiers, not the broad frame of a Hrothgar. Ceruleum-powered sconces made their best effort to beat back the oppressive darkness of the trench, but could not reveal the impending threat that awaited-- indeed, it was Graff’s sharp feline ears that picked up the click of a firearm’s lever, mere ilms from his face.

“Bozjan,” he heard a low voice say. That of a young man. It was shaking, exhausted. “Why have you come? To kill us?”

Graff remained unfazed. “A Conjurer from… Aldenard,” he growled back, still unable to speak the name of his home. When the young soldier said nothing, he clarified-- “A healer. You said ‘us’, are there more in this hole? Do you have injured?”

“It’s a trick…!” the soldier replied hastily, hands shaking audibly around the rifle he carried. “From Eorzea? Those savages were eradicated, every last one of them. Take your foul magicks and go back to where you--”

A second man’s voice came from behind the first. “Decimus, is someone there?” His eye adjusting to the light, Graff could see the outline of a second soldier behind the first-- and it seemed a torch had been struck in the room beyond.

The first voice, the young Decimus, replied over his shoulder. “A fool cat. Claims he’s a healer from from the savage lands. Give me the word and I’ll blow his head clean off--”

“Seven hells, man,” said the second voice, “if he’s a healer, who gives a flaming pile of shite if he’s Bozjan, or Eorzean, or a ghost from the bloody moon? Bring him in, hurry. Selphia is in a bad way, and I doubt she’ll make it to morning without treatment.”

It took several long, pointed seconds for Decimus to lower his weapon, and Graff could make out a hand clapping down on the soldier’s shoulder. “Come on, then,” said the second voice. “You, healer. I don’t know piss-all about any magick, but if you are who you say you are, we could use your assistance.” Despite the vulgarity, the man’s voice was possessed of the coolness of military tactician, a man who knew which hands to play and which to fold.

Graff and the two soldiers emerged into a dug-out chamber, illuminated with blue ceruleum lamps. The equipment on the walls, the Hrothgar assumed, was related to communications-- a small table had been set up with folding chairs made of pipe and fabric, and there were four spartan cots, on one of which lay an injured woman. She was fair, with auburn hair, and a customary “third eye” that marked her as Garlean.

“It was one of the Predators,” the second man-- a Centurion, Graff guessed by his attire-- said solemly. “All the sodding Magitek went helter-skelter when the storm came. She almost got away, but her leg...”

Graff rolled up the sleeves of his once-regal Allagan-styled coat. “Your commanding officer?” he asked, cutting away the bloodied gauze from the woman’s wounds to analyze them. The gash from a Predator’s claw started above her hip and ran down the entire length of her thigh, the tendons of her knee severed on the backside. It was badly infected, an odor not unlike almonds meeting the Hrothgar’s sensitive pantherine nose.

“Dead,” the Centurion answered, somewhat taken aback by this savage’s knowledge of Garlean rank. “A week prior. He went out for provisions, and I watched a Colossus cleave him in two.”

“How long ago was she injured?” Graff continued, trying to draw aether from the dead earth.

“Less than two days,” the Centurion replied. “The air… something is different than it used to be. I’ve seen hurts like this before, but they never advanced so dramatically.”

Without aether from the Star beneath him, Graff began to channel the corporeal aether of his own body, something he had only attempted perhaps twice in the past. Before, it had burned, as though his flesh were being consumed by fire-- now, however, it was but a dull ache, akin to trimming one’s nail too close to the quick. The glow of the magick illuminated the chamber, the Centurion and his charge staring slack-jawed at the act before them, as though bearing witness to a miracle.

_Cleanse the infection first,_ Graff thought to himself.  _Do not close the wound until the infection is gone. If I fall here, and can make sure the wound is cleansed, she still has a chance._

Slowly, white suppuration and gangrenous flesh began to shift, color returning to the edges of the woman’s wound, fresh blood seeping from the gore.  _Good_ , Graff told himself.  _Good, her heart still beats strong._

And then, overcome with dizziness, he fell to one knee. The Centurion was upon him in an instant, making an effort to support a man who, a month prior, he would have slain without a second’s hesitation.

“You all right, Sage?” the Centurion asked Graff, genuine concern marring his previously detached tone. He turned to bark over his shoulder. “Decimus, get this man some water, now!”

Decimus was clearly incredulous. “But sir, we barely have enough for--”

“I said  _do it, now!_ ” barked the Centurion.

The moniker of ‘Sage’ amused Graff into a dark chuckle. He briefly allowed himself the musing that, as the last survivor of Gridania’s Conjurers, he could  _technically_ be dubbed the Seedseer, but cursed the notion a breath later. What a cruel thought. While gifted as a Conjurer, he had nowhere near the connection to the Elementals the padjal had. The Elementals, that had been purged from the Twelveswood by the calamity.

Decimus brought Graff a canteen, which the Hrothgar drank from gratefully. It was as ambrosia from the gods, a reminder that he was, indeed, still alive. Handing the emptied canteen back to the Centurion at his side, he resumed his ministrations on the woman before him.

Through the aether of his corpus, Graff’s Conjury was clumsy, but serviceable, like trying to weave silken cloth out of hempen twine. At the end of a full ten minutes, the wound was closed and the infection cured, but an ugly, gouging scar remained.

“Re-… Remarkable,” Decimus proclaimed in reverent tones, but the Centurion clapped him on the back, rising to his feet.

“Bloody unbelievable!” he shouted, a beaming smile on his parched lips.

Graff looked over his shoulder to smile, before collapsing to the dirt floor of the chamber.

The sky was beautiful and blue, with trace wisps of clouds, visible through the boughs of the Central Shroud. Beams of warm sunlight dappled across the Hrothgar’s face and chest.

“You saved her,” Graff heard Owainnaut say.

“Oh, good,” Graff sighed, smiling beneath his mustache. He could feel the grass against his back through his shirt, the rushing of the river and the creaking of Figaga’s Gift audible in the distance.

“They still need you,” Owainnaut’s voice continued. Graff didn’t feel his friend was nearby, but somehow, he didn’t care.

“I know,” the Hrothgar replied. “I just need to rest a little longer.”

“I haven’t seen you push yourself so hard since you were laboring under Timbermaster Beatin,” Owainnaut laughed.

“Was that why you were so attracted to me?” Graff teased. “That I was such a hard worker?”

“One reason,” Owainnaut said, coyly. “I must have told you a hundred times when we were together, your tenacity will be the death of you.”

“Where did we go wrong?” Graff asked, opening his eyes to stare up through the treetops.

“I don’t think we went wrong,” Owainnaut replied, his tone thoughtful. “I think we both realized, we were better together as friends than as lovers.”

“There is a certain truth to that.”

A few moments passed, a cool breeze filling Graff’s nose with the scents of the vibrant, living forest.

“They still need you,” Owainnaut repeated.

“I know.” Graff yawned. “I just need to rest a little longer.”

Graff sat up, and it took him some effort to recall where he was. His entire body ached, but strangely, he relished it. The pain was something he could finally feel, unlike the sensation of disconnection that had been omnipresent the past month. The foxhole was dim, but he could make out the figures seated around the small table on the opposite side of the room from his cot.

“The Sage! He’s awake!” This was a voice the Hrothgar didn’t recognize, a sprightly female voice. One of the figures rose to its feet unsteadily, balanced on what appeared to be a crutch under her right arm. As his eye adjusted to the light, Graff could see if was the female soldier, hobbling awkwardly toward him.

“Master Sage, it is with great honor that I see you wake this day,” the girl chirped breathlessly, her tone dripping formality as though she were meeting the Emperor himself. It was her attempt at utmost gratitude and respect, Graff knew, but such platitudes had died with the rest of the world. The Hrothgar held up a hand to quiet her.

“Your leg?” he asked curtly, trying to avail himself a better glimpse of her injury in the low light.

“Fit for duty, sir, thanks to you,” the soldier pipped, an obvious lie given her reliance on the makeshift crutch under her arm.

“Easy, Selphia,” came the voice of the Centurion, walking up behind his charge. “Let the man be for a moment, he’s been asleep for three damn days.” To Graff, he intoned, “Girl’s been staring at you like a stewpot, I swear. You rolled over once in your sleep and I thought she was going to bring the whole place down.” He extended his hand toward the Hrothgar, offering half a Garlean combat ration. “Ain’t much, but three days without food, I was bettin’ you’d need it.”

“Three days,” Graff repeated. It was true that he had barely slept since the calamity. Squinting at the ration, he asked, “How much is left?”

“Last bit,” the Centurion answered grimly. “We saved it for you. Figured once you came back to us, we’d make a run for the Bozjan outpost, and you magicky types, well… didn’t anticipate it’d take so much out of you.”

Graff briefly considered telling the Centurion why his casting of such simple spells had taxed him so dearly, but decided that consuming the half-ration was much more important. Once he had finished it, the Hrothgar rose to his feet, stretching his aching joints, testing the steadiness of his feet.

“She can walk?” he asked the Centurion. The reply he received was a noncommittal gesture, a wobbling of his hand back and forth. His charge looked down, dejected. Though her life had been saved, she knew she was a liability.

Craning his neck, he tried to get a look at the second charge, Decimus. “Him?”

The Centurion replied for his soldier. “Low on morale, but ready to move.”

Graff took a deep breath in through his mouth, and let it out slowly through his nose, as he had done many times before when risking his life.

“Let’s go.”

_I will make what’s left of my life mean something in this world of ruin._

Outside of the foxhole, not much had changed, the stagnant air rendered even more wretched by the rot of the festering corpses. The ever-present stomping of the mad machines was distant from their position in the trench-- the Centurion and Decimus climbed out to the surface first, with Graff hoisting Selphia up to them from below. He could get a better look at her injury through her torn uniform in the daylight, or what could be called daylight under the blanket of sinister stormcloud that had blotted out the sky. The scar was twisted and grotesque, and the tendons in her knee were still severed. Though she put on a brave face, Graff knew her leg would not move at her command. She would need to be carried.

Once he had reached the surface, the Centurion stared at him, as if asking what their next action should be.

“You lead,” Graff bade him. “I trust you received intelligence on the battlefield from the Empire, you know it better than I.”

The Centurion nodded, and with that consent, Graff swept Selphia off her feet into a princess-carry. “Arms around my neck,” he told her, and, though clearly humiliated, she complied.

The going was slow, decidedly plodding, but Graff had the utmost faith in the Garlean Centurion. The Garleans were resourceful, tenacious, and cunning, which made them dangerous adversaries, and worthy allies. The Centurion showed he had more than a passing knowledge of the way the automata behaved, and how they were able to sense their quarries, making very careful instructions to the group as to how and where they should move. The muscles of Graff’s body burned, crying for hydration, for nourishment, for rest, but the pain was more of anything than he had felt in the eternity since the Black Rose came. It was a welcome distraction from the memories, the death, the unfathomable loss.

The group stopped near an alcove of tall stones after nearly a half-hour, allowing Graff to let Selphia down and rest his arms and neck. “Not too much further now,” the Centurion told them, though he sounded unable to catch his breath. 

“Can you go on?” Graff asked. Decimus and Selphia remained silent, but the Centurion chuffed out a weak laugh. “As though we’ve got a choice,” he joked. The man’s levity was a welcome reprieve, in the absence of any real succor. “Over the next ridge, we’ll have a clear shot straight to the encampment, as long as the terrain has held up under the storm. We’ll move--”

The sounds of stomping, distant feet of a gigantic foe on the dead earth, were growing audibly closer, and suddenly the air was shattered by a scream the likes of which Graff had never heard, somewhere between the death knell of an animal and metal being scraped against stone.

“Now!” the Centurion shouted. “We’ll move now!!”

A blade twice the length of Graff’s body rent the stone alcove into shards of shrapnel. Towering above was an iron giant, a Magitek Colossus larger than any Graff had ever seen. It continued to scream, bringing its grand sword to bear on what remained of the boulders. Despite his body’s protests, the Hrothgar hoisted up Selphia, and sprinted alongside the soldiers in the direction of the encampment.

The fields were surprisingly barren, still but for the screeching automata giving its insane chase. Either this beast had destroyed the others, or they knew well enough to stay away from it. The Bozjan encampment was visible, even in the swirling dust. It couldn’t be more than half a malm away.

“Keep running!” the Centurion called. “We can make it!”

_And what then?_ Graff asked himself. If they lured this thing to the encampment, the resistance fighters would have as much of a chance of stopping it as they did.

No.

They would not make it.

Even if they arrived, the Colossus would kill them all.

“Stop!” Graff shouted, once he was sure there was enough space between his group and the pursuant monster for him to muster himself. When the Centurion wheeled around, Graff tossed Selphia into his arms.

“What do you intend to do?” the soldier cried over the screeching and stomping, horrified at the prospect of what their savior might be proposing.

“This is the end of my story,” the Hrothgar told them, turning his back to the Garlean soldiers.

“I intend to make what’s left of my life mean something in this world of ruin.”

He drew the staff from the sling on the back of his coat, and held it before him with both hands. The aether whipped around him, what little the Star had left to give beneath his feet. The brown-gray soil turned to pure-white sand, slowing spreading across the field.

“Hear me monster, and know ye fear, have thee such capacity!” the Hrothgar cried out, in a voice so loud and clear he almost believed it to be his own. Ribbons of corporeal aether began to unwind from his garments and dissolve, fueling the cyclone that was encompassing his stalwart figure.

“I am Graff dus Lagerthasch, Eques of the VIIth Legion, christened ‘Iron Chest’ by Crystal River and the Hellsguard of Sohm Al! I am Graff Ironchest, Servant of the great City-State of Gridania as Serpent Captain to the Twin Adder!”

The aether around him had become a luminous vortex, the very matter of his clothing stripped away into energy. Slowly, his own body also began to give way, strands pulling from his flesh and bone like a doll being unraveled.

“Graff Ironchest, who rebuilt Gridania under Timbermaster Beatin! Graff Ironchest, the first of his ilk recognized for Conjury by the Elder Seedseer Kan-E-Senna and the Elementals of the Twelveswood!”

There was no pain. This was the chorus, the song of the earth, the harmony of the Lifestream. The Centurion, Decimus, and Selphia gazed on in awe and horror, no longer running-- Bozjans in the encampment watched the growing light with amazement. Watchers through their spyglasses, the Bozjans and Garleans still entrenched for their own safety emerged to bear witness to the spectacle.

Graff opened both his eyes, no longer green, but a uniform white of blistering energy. Even as he flaked away, piece by piece, his voice bellowed as it once could before the calamity, amplified and carried through the tumultuous aether. The monster’s screaming had stopped. Only the whistling melody of the Great Gospel remained.

“And I, Graff Ironchest, say that you will _not_ take the lives of those with the will to survive in this world of ruin! I will stand, with every fiber of my being, on the earth of our battered Star, and _deny_ _you_!”

And with those final words, the chorus of life could be heard by all those present that day on the Bozjan Front, even the Garleans, unattuned to aether. The beating heart of Creation, of the Star herself, a whisper in the ears of all alive. It was a stillness unlike that of a desolate battlefield, but instead, that of the forest at night.

A silence, filled with life.

A column of light, fifty yalms across, engulfed the lone Hrothgar where he stood, and the colossus with him, a blinding radiance that split the heavens, punching a perfect circle into the toxic clouds above. It persisted for some long moments, but when it dissipated, the clouds did not return to that puncture through their gloom, and the blue sky shone through clearly, cascading sunlight onto a single spot below.

On the ground beneath, where Graff had once stood, the husk of the mighty Colossus was seated. Lush grass surrounded its rusted shell, and it was overgrown with vines and vivid vegetation, as though a thousand years had passed in the span of an instant. Native flora that had been scorched from the land well before the calamity flourished in this single spot of fifty yalms, vibrant flowers and brave saplings stretching upward, soaking up the sunbeam from the opened sky. A small crystal, pearl white, egg-shaped, and bearing the insignia of Gridania’s Conjurers’ Guild, floated for a few moments above the spot where the Hrothgar had once stood, before dropping to the grass below.

_I have made what’s left of my life mean something in this world of ruin._

“You saved them,” Owainnaut said. Graff could sense him lying in the grass nearby. Reaching out, but not looking, he found the Duskwight’s slender hand and held it, as the sunlight dappled his face and chest through the boughs of the Central Shroud.

“It was already over for me,” the Hrothgar replied, a self-satisfied smile only barely concealed by his mustache. He felt a firm squeeze from his friend’s hand. “ I simply passed my torch.”

“You’re too modest,” the Duskwight chastised him. “Without you, all of them would have surely perished.”

“Was that why you were so attracted to me?” Graff teased. “That I was so modest?”

“One reason,” Owainnaut said, coyly. “I must have told you a hundred times when we were together, you should take the credit that you’re due.”

“We  _are_ together again,” was Graff’s reply, opening his eyes to gaze up through the trees. “I had hoped we’d meet again,  someday,  under a blue sky.”

Owainnaut  sighed peacefully, and gave Graff’s hand another squeeze . “ Beyond the clouds, the sky is ever-blue.”

“There is a certain truth to that.”

_And I hope they remember that when they think of me._


End file.
